County Council disappointing as watchdog

WHITE

When you write as many columns as I do, your observations occasionally will turn out to be wrong. I know I'm not infallible.

Still, I find myself wincing as I recall the column I wrote about the reorganization meeting two years ago for the Northampton County Council.

In a county where no council ever had more than two Republicans, voters had just opted for a 6-3 GOP majority. This looked like a repudiation of County Executive Glenn Reibman, whom voters had reluctantly re-elected over Ron Angle. Given the alternative, they were willing to give Reibman another term. But they wanted to make sure he would be checked by a board willing to challenge him.

I felt this was prudent, given his rocky first term. And as I watched that reorganization meeting unfold, I came to some conclusions.

I suggested that President J. Michael Dowd would bend over backward to maintain harmony among council members. That new Councilman Nick Sabatine would be a formidable force on council. That the Republicans would relentlessly pursue their own agenda, which did not agree with Reibman's. That they would try to pursue it in an orderly, civil way.

Overriding all this was the sense that this would be a positive change that would improve county government.

Today, it's clear that I was mostly wrong.

Yes, Dowd has tried to promote harmony, but the board is so bitterly divided that it's incapable of producing five votes for much of anything. Sabatine, far from being the prime mover and shaker, has little influence with his colleagues. The Republican agenda was discarded, and the board reduced to whining about its alleged lack of power. These complaints so infuriated county Judge William Moran, a framer of the home rule charter, that he blasted council in an open meeting for not using the powerful tools at its disposal.

To summarize, the Republicans on council ended up rudderless, divided and outmaneuvered at every turn. In the most shocking turnaround, they even ended up as Reibman's co-conspirators in directing county funds to boost campaign contributors.

That nadir arrived when the administration found that some of the projects originally contemplated in its giant bond issue had fallen through. Instead of applying that money to the bond's underfunded capital projects, Reibman proposed employing it as de facto Walking Around Money, redistributed to aid well-connected, hand-picked developers of other private projects.

The County Council of January 2002 wouldn't have considered going along. The County Council of summer 2003 waved it through, with the support of five of six Republicans. It was like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Reibman reinforced council's toothless image last month during the debate over whether he should be allowed to implement a project labor agreement for the prison and courthouse expansions.

Opponents argued -- rightly -- that the taxpayers were best served by opening bidding to everyone, rather than restricting it through labor union quotas. But some members of council were nervous about the political implications of opposing the idea. While they were bobbing and weaving, Reibman issued an executive order -- mysteriously dated a week before it was distributed -- that, short of a successful lawsuit, seems to cut council out of the decision.

This isn't the first ineffective County Council in Northampton County. Reibman got a free ride in his first term from rubber-stamp Democrats. But this time, I expected the watchdogs to have teeth. I was wrong. They're all yip and no bite.